NEM Foundation: Coincheck Hackers Moving Stolen Coins

The hackers who stole approximately $530 mln worth of NEM coins from the largest Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck on Jan. 26 are now moving some of those coins to different addresses, NEM Foundation vice president Jeff McDonald told Reuters on Tuesday, Jan. 30.

According to Reuters, NEM Foundation managed to detect that hackers began sending transactions of 100 NEM coins, worth about $83 each, to “random addresses”. The NEM team is currently trying to detect the location of the hackers, but it hasn’t been able to pinpoint it so far.

“When people look to launder these types of funds, they sometimes spread it into smaller transactions because it’s less likely to trigger anti-money laundering mechanisms.”

Contrary to Reuters’ original report, the hackers do not seem to be trying to cash out by moving the stolen coins to cryptocurrency exchanges. As NEM Europe promoter Paul Reiger claimed in an email sent to the Coindesk news site on Jan. 31:

“There were eleven 100 XEM transactions from one of the hacker accounts to ‘random’ accounts. Nothing was sold. There were also no attempted transactions to exchanges.”

The Coincheck exchange announced that it was hacked and roughly 520 million NEM coins were stolen from its storage on Jan. 26. As Cointelegraph reported on Jan. 27, the company promised to compensate all losses to the users affected by the hack.